


A Different Kind of Ghost

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Exes to Lovers, F/M, Minor Character Death, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28388004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Bellamy and Raven used to take on the jobs that no one else wanted or could do: finding people who did not want to be found and objects that seemed permanently lost. Then she found a mentor, and something like a home. When he needed to leave, she had to stay.Now Raven is a recluse, bitter with her own loss, and Bellamy is finally ready to come home.A Bellamy/Raven exes-to-lovers steampunk au.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Raven Reyes
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9
Collections: Ravenbell New Year Fanfiction Exchange (2020)





	A Different Kind of Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [semele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/gifts).



> This fic is a gift for ravenbells for the Ravenbell New Year Fanfiction Exchange 2020 on tumblr.
> 
> I combined two prompts for this: steampunk au and exes who get back together. 
> 
> I love exes to lovers stories but know fairly little about steampunk and have never tried to write it before. So this is definitely a big experiment for me in that regard. I had fun doing it, though, and I just hope it's all right!
> 
> I was particularly influenced by [this image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk#/media/File:Aerial_house3.jpg), and also by [these giant marionettes](https://twitter.com/Steampunk_T/status/926428723196383232) by the Royal de Luxe street theater company. I'll just say now that the marionettes have nothing much to do with this fic in its final form but they were my original source of inspiration and are also just............ really cool.
> 
> Minor character death explained in end notes.

The sky has turned a bruised yellow, like the inside of a plum, by the time Bellamy starts seeing the robots in the fields. He’s been peddling for hours now, on a borrowed bicycle he picked up in the village, for so long that he no longer hears the squeak in the front wheel or the sound of his own labored breathing. All of this is only background noise as he travels farther and farther away along the dirt path out to nowhere.

The robots stand abandoned, towering piles of scrap, like warnings. Their unseeing eyes shine despite the gloom. After dark they will become nothing but inscrutable shadows, but for now Bellamy can still make out the details of them: a quizzical tilt of the head in one, the visible gears in another’s chest. Old ruins. The farther he rides, the less humanoid they become. He sees a house turned inside out, a potbellied stove for its stomach; a giant with a single, luminous eye as a head, reflecting a manic sky; a winged creature made of stained glass.

He keeps going.

Past the robots, the fields extend, and finally set back within the rank and waving grasses, he finds the house. She must have built it herself. Like the robots, it’s been constructed from the found and the bartered and the left behind. His gaze follows the porch halfway around the front of the ground floor, then jumps up to the balcony on the far-right side, then up again, to the turret that spirals up behind it, crooked but watchful. All of the shutters on the windows are closed, and the wood’s been left unpainted. A late-summer stillness gathers over the scene. The most decisive signs of life are the hulking shadows behind the house itself, inscrutable outlines of projects still unfinished and collected piles of scrap. As he stares, the last of the sun glints off the metal rooftop, sending a streak of light across the field.

Bellamy shields his eyes as he lets the bike drop down onto the road. No path leads up to the house. He has to wade through the grass instead. The muscles in his legs burn and ache, but he's almost there, almost there after an interminable journey—close enough to wonder for the first time what he'll say when she opens the door. He has to assume she will open the door.

When he reaches the halfway point between the road and the house, the circular eye in the turret clicks and blinks, and Bellamy stops. He whips his gaze toward it but it's quiet now. Instead, he hears a much greater and much deeper shifting and turning of gears. And then, as he stares, the house itself begins to rise.

The platform on which it was built, at first settled into the ground and invisible behind the grass, lifts slowly up, the pattern of metal bars beneath unstacking and bending, unfolding from themselves like an accordion expanding. Curls of steam rise up from the chimney. Through the criss-crossing pattern of the risers beneath the house, Bellamy can see the work yard in the back, appearing as a once-secret place revealed behind a rising curtain. It is a mess of weeds and dirt, mostly. Among other fragments, he finds a deflated hot air balloon. A giant, cracked propeller. A half-built airship, barely more than bones.

He looks up again only when the house stops moving. The whole structure towers above him now. He has to tilt his head back to look at it, but as the gears stop and the silence of the countryside reasserts itself again, he can hear the distinctive rhythm of her gait against the wooden floor. The front door opens, then, and Raven steps out onto the porch.

Bellamy holds his arm up and waves at her. She's too far away for him to make out the expression on her face, but he can tell from the way she's cocked her hip and crossed her arms that she's not amused.

"Permission to come aboard?" he yells.

She makes him wait a long time before she answers. He sees the shifting of her shoulders, like a sigh, and the way she leans forward with her hands on the porch railing, peering down at him from above.

She walks inside again and the door slams shut. A moment later, the house descends again.

*

Up close, Raven looks exactly the same, just as he remembered and imagined. She's wearing her favorite brown work pants, with pockets down the legs for her tools, and an extra tool belt slung around her waist. Those black boots that rise up almost to her knee—they had to wade across swampland once, trying to find one of Kane's old people out there hidden in the muck, and Bellamy's shoes were so ruined that he had to buy himself another pair with their earnings, but Raven's survived. Her indestructible boots. She's pulled her hair back in a messier ponytail now, but she's still got the same, round, black googles balanced on top of her head, and stray bits of grease, like permanent but ever-shifting markings, on her face and her bare arms.

Instead of looking at him, she pushes the sleeves of her shirt higher up past her elbows. The shirt itself, white, and half-unbuttoned, is worn over a lighter, sleeveless purple shirt. _I like layers_ , she'd told him once, the first time, as he unbuttoned it. Avoiding the issue then, too.

With all the shutters closed, the only natural light is that which streams in through chinks and imperfections in the wood. Golden spots and pools of it gather on the tabletops, the far walls, the floor. Dust motes dance in this light. Their footsteps sound with hollow echoes on the floor. Raven leads him through the main room first, busy with worktables, on which he makes out a torn apart engine, her toolbox, reams of blueprints and schematics, two lanterns both gone dark. She picks one up and continues on into the kitchen.

This room feels more like home but less like her. She puts the lantern on the table and lights it, and the gloom does not dissipate but is at least pushed back into the corners of the narrow space. Bellamy leans back against the countertop. The edge of his hand bumps against a glass jar, but he feels too large and awkward here, and if there is no better space for him, he'll take this bit and claim it as his own.

Raven yanks a chair back from the table roughly, so that it lands facing out, facing him, and then sits down. She sits with her left leg extended straight out ahead of her. The only sign that she's nervous is the way she taps her fingertip against the shining gears of her brace.

"Is this about a job?" she asks. "Something you can't do yourself?"

Bellamy allows himself to smile. To her, it will look rueful, like a taunt or a dare, but to him it feels fond.

Instead of answering, he says, "It took a while to figure out where you were. Then when I did, I had to laugh. Right outside Arkadia? Really?” He tilts his head just enough to catch her eye. “I never thought you were the type to return home."

"I wouldn't say this is _right outside_." She squints at him, drops her gaze down to his feet and then lets it wander slowly up. "No one uses this old road anymore. Not unless they're coming to see me."

"For a job."

"The kinds of jobs I do now."

Mechanic work. Fixing things, building things. In the glow of the lantern flame, he sees new dark shadows under her eyes: the only sign of age. He notices the hunch in her shoulders, too. She used to do that only when she was working, and deep into the work, early in her apprenticeship when everything was still difficult for her, and she chased that difficulty, ranted and raved at it and loved it. He'd come back from his latest odd job and find her still bent over some mysterious collection of gears. And he’d call her back to herself with his hands on her shoulders. Rub the tension from them slowly. She wouldn't say a word, only lean back until she fell against him, boneless and calm.

"Yeah, Jasper told me. And where to find you."

She laughs, once, trying to flatten the humor in the sound. But he sees it in her eyes. "I'll kill him."

"I would have found you one way or another."

"Mmmm. You're good at that."

_Among other talents_ , he imagines her saying, words he thinks he might hear in the soft edges of her voice. If she didn't want him here, she would never have come down. She could have left him standing in the field all through the chill night and through sunrise. But then he'd be there in her work yard in the morning. She'd find him lounging in the makeshift seat of the propeller, resting his weary legs, waiting for her.

Maybe it's only because she knows him so well, Bellamy and his infamous and stubborn persistence, that she let him in.

"So you went to all this trouble," she's saying, "tracking down another person who doesn't want to be found. Do you want me to fix that piece of crap bike you came on?"

"You know, the first place I looked for you was in Mecha. At Sinclair's old place."

The name does as he expected it would: sets her off. She shoots up from the chair with predator swiftness, sending it scuttling across the floor behind her until it knocks against the table. The lantern flame flickers. But she stops herself halfway across the distance left between them, as if hindered by invisible tethers. Her hands are balled into fists.

"Then you know he's dead. What else do you know?"

"He left you his business."

"I have my own business."

Her favorite thing was always turning nothing into something. She had a great mind for it, even before Sinclair found her and took her in. Honed those skills she picked up in bits and pieces, formed something newer and better and bigger. Something beyond him, he'd thought, when he left.

_Did you like me when I was rough?_ she'd asked, once, and he'd traced patterns across the bare skin of her leg and thought even then that the question would haunt him for a long time. It repeated in his head on the morning they’d said goodbye, so insistently and so strongly that he’d half-expected her to ask it of him again.

"So you've built a fortress out here,” he says. “You came home but you don't want to be found. You want security and anonymity. What are you hiding from?" He keeps the question low and secret-deep, almost a threat, but she's gotten herself together now. This attempt at goading doesn't work.

"You think everyone's on the run. Always have." She turns away from him, toward the shuttered window over the sink. "You've been at this job too long, Bellamy. Whatever you're caught up in now, whatever you need me for, you need to let it go." She takes a deep breath, and his own fingers curl, and his chest aches with a tension he cannot unwind. He's waiting for her to say it. "You need to let Octavia go, too."

The last time they saw each other, that wretched goodbye scene, he'd stood out in the airfield out past Mecha with the ship at his back, and the wind high, and cursed himself for letting this moment drag. They'd told themselves _no real goodbyes_ , and yet there they were. He'd wanted to keep looking for his sister, and Raven had wanted to stay, and differences like that could not be bridged. Compromises could not be drawn. She'd looked at him instead with unsaid questions in the sad and stubborn set of her mouth, accusations that he wished she would just say. Holding his hands so tightly that it hurt. Her hair worn loose for once and blowing in the wind.

If she'd just said it, he could have reassured her: he wasn't leaving because of her, her new ambition, her new life. He knew he didn't fit within it anymore but he would have tried. Family, though. Old promises. Responsibilities that had grown with him, a second skin.

"I know," he says.

Raven half-turns to him, doesn't say anything, waits.

Bellamy takes a deep breath. He'd hoped to stir her emotions up, make her vulnerable enough to admit something first: that underneath the bitterness of separation and the anger of being found, she was happy to have him home again. But instead, he's the one who's been broken down.

"I found her," he says. "I had to track her all the way to Polis."

"And she's—?"

"Alive, yeah. Safe. Different." Harder-edged and braver and stronger, and no longer reliant on him. Not the image of a little girl, barely grown, that he'd kept in his head ever since her disappearance, the girl he'd been searching for with such single-minded clarity that he hadn’t even noticed the passage of time. He'd grown too used to that one picture of her; he’d never seen how worn and faded it had become.

"It's odd, isn't it?" Raven asks. "Achieving a goal that seemed impossible? It's like it haunts you worse when it's done." She turns away from him again, lifts her face so that the thin ray of fading sun through the blinds lights the curve of her cheekbone, shines in her hair. "I'm glad she's okay."

"So am I. And you're right. Lacking purpose—that's a different sort of ghost."

He watches her a long moment, not waiting or wanting. This precise and steady patience that he feels now, he hasn't known in a long time; it comes from being with her.

Eventually, Raven turns and walks toward him, the anger in her finally deflated. She lets out a deep breath like she's stealing herself. Then she reaches out as if to take his hands and instead curls her fingers around his wrists. She looks up at him, but he can hardly read her expression in the shadows. "I did it, too, you know. Sinclair and I finished the plans for the—"

"City in the sky," he finishes with her. It's been so long, and he believed in it so little, that he'd all but forgotten. But it comes back to him now, as easily as the words do. Scraps like puzzle pieces snap together in his mind.

The rising house. The blueprints she'd sweep under their bed every night. Hints of sketches as beautiful and as precise and as unreal as the first airship he ever saw, floating out over the fields behind his mother's house, when he was just a child.

"The city in the sky," Raven repeats. She's holding back a smile but only barely. He recognizes this look, too: she'd get that certain glint in her eye every time she came up with a new idea or solved a problem. He thought sometimes that she never looked more beautiful and that he never loved her more. "I haven't even let myself say it since Sinclair was killed. Whoever got him took it. It was probably Kane, that fuck. But it could have been Jaha, or Griffin, or Diyoza."

"Long suspect list."

She quirks her eyebrow up. "Valuable plans."

He twists his hands in her grip and reaches out for her wrists, tugging her forehead so they're toe to toe and almost chest to chest. That same naive part of him that had hoped to find his sister still a little girl who loved him and needed him, now lets that old and stupid thought take over him again: that he and Raven could pick up where they left off, someday. Hadn't that been the unspoken promise, hidden in their last kiss?

"I'll make you a deal," he says, so low that Raven rises on her toes, bracing herself with her hands on his waist, to get close enough to hear. "You come out of retirement for one last job—"

"And when we get the bastards, you finally retire, too."

He slings his arms around her waist, drawing her in with his hand on the small of her back. She slides her own arms up and curls them over his shoulders. Their noses brush. They try to look each other in the eye, quickly become cross-eyed, and—though the moment makes Bellamy's heart race in his chest—cannot help but laugh.

Impulsively, he picks her up and twirls her around. She lands on her feet again, pressed back against the countertop, pulls him in, all at once, with a hand fisted in his hair, into a kiss. They do not remember each other well. The angle is wrong, his nose squashed against her cheek, her teeth clicking against his. They try again. Let the kiss deepen on an inhale. A hint of her tongue flicking against his tongue.

"Is that a deal?" he asks, breathless, in the half-moment's pause before she grabs at him again.

Raven nods. "It's a deal."

*

They set out in the spring, in the airship that was only bones when Bellamy arrived. Raven teaches him how to build. His hands grow new callouses and his back learns new aches, but in the evening, they light a fire outside against the coming chill and he sits on an overturned crate with Raven on his lap, and she traces the once-familiar features of his face. Kisses his nose and underneath his eyes and the curve of his jaw. He scrubs away the grease stains on her skin. He twines his fingers with her fingers and holds them steady in the air between them, as if they were dancing, as he kisses her again and again and again.

The City in the Sky, in the hands of the wrong people, would be disastrous for everyone left on the ground. In the right hands—perhaps no more than a beautiful dream. Perhaps a revolution.

So this might be the most important job of their lives.

They wait out a long winter, watching for the ground to thaw.

And when the first light breezes of the new season blow in, and the snow melts, they shut up the little house in the middle of nowhere and they board their new ship, and they fly up and away into the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> The minor character death is Sinclair, who is killed (mysteriously) off the page and before the story starts.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @kinetic-elaboration.


End file.
